Understanding, Measuring and Improving the Security of Collaboration Tools

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Killian Davitt and Steven Murdoch

To achieve secure collaboration it is sometimes essential to not only to protect the content of communications, but also protect the identity of participants from third party observers and possibly even between participants themselves. Anonymous communication tools such as Tor can help achieve this goal, but only if they are sufficiently usable to allow safe participation by non-experts. The collaboration scenario is also particularly challenging for anonymous communication systems because the latency introduced by such systems can significantly harm usability. This project explores the usability of collaboration tools in the context of anonymous communications, through a combination of theoretical, qualitative and quantitative methods.

This work was also supported through Collaborative ResistancE To Web Surveillance (CREWS), funded by UKRI through the Human Data Interaction Network Plus.

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